An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence

A fifteen minute presentation of the ERC project called AIME which will be published in French in September 2012 and in English in March 2013.

For a philosophy that is empirical and not simply empiricist, investigation offers the only way to ferret out its concepts and then put them to the test before proposing a version that can be submitted to critique by its peers. And yet, even though investigation as a genre benefits from a distinguished and intimidating prestige in philosophy, it is fairly unusual for an author to propose to carry out an investigation with the participation of his readers. This is nevertheless what I propose to do in publishing a book titled An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, alongside a digital site that allows its visitors, who will have become co-investigators, to inspect its arguments and go on to suggest other fields to study, other proofs, other accounts. By means of this arrangement I invite my co-investigators to help me find the guiding thread of the experience by becoming attentive to several regimes of truth, which I call modes of existence, after the strange book by Étienne Souriau, recently republished, that features this phrase in its title.